As a progressive web hosting brands many companies seem to be fully committed to promoting the interests of the hosting clients/resellers while at the same investing honest endeavors to maintain and promote the fair industry practices. One such brand is Jelastic Cloud.

What is Jelastic Cloud and how it helps the hosting industry?

Jelastic Cloud is an innovative technology that has brought revolutionary changes to the hosting industry by using Java as a key tool for solving server management complexity while lowering the costs of Java hosting. Along with that the company also employs containers for multiplying efficiency without any premium costs.

Here are some excerpts from a candid and open conversation The Social Digital had with Ruslan Synytsky, CEO ‘Jelastic Cloud’;

1. Every company starts with some objective that works as a driving force behind it. What were the core objectives that birth to Jelastic?

From own experience, we noticed that companies spend a massive amount of human resources on the configuration of application servers and databases, ongoing maintenance of the infrastructure, security updates and, of course, architecture modernization when the project is growing, for example, going from standalone VPS to a cluster of instances with horizontal scaling and high availability.

We built the initial prototype for our own needs and then figured out that there is a high demand for such a solution among other developers. At that time in 2010, it was an early stage of PaaS adoption, so the choice was limited, especially for Java:

* Too complex to manage, because there are so many different implementations of Java application servers, a huge number of libraries and configuration options to go with. Multiply it on the choice of possible databases people use and it gets even more complicated. As a result, the level of the support team should be advanced and thus more expensive.

* Too heavy (consumes a lot of RAM) to make its usage cheap or at least cost-effective for startups, small projects, SMBs. Initially, Java was not designed for elastic environments, as a result, it reserved resources even if they’re not needed anymore.

Another major issue, which we discovered in traditional hosting, is a huge churn and migration from VPS and shared hosting to automated and managed modern clouds. Also, for smaller hosting companies it became even more difficult to survive on the market due to high competition from cloud giants with advanced technologies.

We decided to solve these problems and made crucial decisions:

* focus initially on Java to solve the complexity of its servers management and make Java hosting cost efficient

* use containers as underlying virtualization layer for increasing efficiency of resource utilization and replicating the initially built automation for various additional programming languages, such as PHP and Node.js

* target customers through the channel of local hosting service providers with their existing infrastructure and support.

2. Since the time the company came into existence, Jelastic Cloud has constantly been evolving. Could you explain how core Jelastic products like IaaS and PaaS have improved?

Jelastic was founded in early 2011 and from the very beginning we positioned ourselves as a pure Java platform but step by step we’ve added support for PHP, Ruby, Node.js, Python and Go. This enables developers to deploy, scale and manage a wide range of applications in the cloud.

From the beginning of the project, our platform was built to support containerization. So when Docker technology evolved, we already had strong expertise in this sphere and seamlessly added support for the Docker сontainers within our platform. And recently, we also added a Kubernetes cluster to the product line considering high demand from customers.

We’ve always worked with end users through hosting service vendors – never selling our own hardware but partnering with infrastructure service providers worldwide. Using this unique model we’ve managed to offer Jelastic as a public cloud in about 30 countries. We have also introduced a private cloud offering, and our platform can be now installed on-premise or as a virtual private cloud on any IaaS. And finally, we moved to hybrid and multi-cloud options, so our customers can mix and match different cloud combinations and vendors managing multiple regions within a single panel.

3. Jelastic offers solutions for enterprises, ISVs, developers and service providers. How do these solutions help the users in overcoming real-life challenges? Could you explain with just a few examples?

Freedom of choice is the core idea that goes throughout the whole Jelastic technology and ecosystem. Customers can choose between various solutions and services, ways of management, hardware and its location to host the data, cloud hosting providers to get support and so on.

ISVs and developers can deploy and run different applications almost instantly on Jelastic, with no code changes. The deployment can be easily performed using GIT/SVN with automatic updates, pre-packaged applications from marketplace, archives (zip, war, ear) right from the dev panel, built-in plugins for Maven or integrated popular IDEs.

Many companies don’t do routine checks to see how much capacity they are using, so in most cases, they are overpaying for resources that never get used. We implemented a unique ability to get the required number of resources (RAM and CPU) without the need to reserve them in advance. This is fully managed by the platform and performed automatically within the stated confines. In this way, customers won’t over-allocate beyond what is needed, especially during low-use or idle times. In combination with the pay-as-you-use pricing model, automatic vertical scaling feature makes the cloud resource consumption really elastic and efficient.

Our self-service portal with user-friendly UI includes an intuitive application topology wizard, deployment manager, access to log and config files and a marketplace with prepackaged applications and functionality for team collaboration. SSH Gateway is available for direct access to the containers. Also, the Jelastic API and command-line interface (CLI) are open for automation of advanced CI and CD pipelines.

Some organizations need to keep data locally, inside the country to comply with different regulation laws. Jelastic partners with service providers across the globe for customers to be able to choose the data center in the needed region to meet the requirements of the data protection rules.

Considering service providers, Jelastic is a ready-to-go cloud business platform for them. We let hosting providers differentiate among competitors by selling full-featured PaaS, Docker hosting, Kubernetes clusters, auto-scalable Elastic VPS and a wide variety of packaged clustered solutions (like Magento, WordPress, replicated SQL and NoSQL databases, etc) to their customers. Also, we provide all the needed tools to manage the platform, support customers, and monitor ROI growth.